Cecil

For his star, DeMille used the legendary stage actress Fannie Ward in only her second movie. Ward wasn't famous for her acting, but for her youthful appear-ance in spite of the fact that she was at least forty-three years old and working in a medium whose harsh lighting could make thirty-year-olds look fifty. Geraldine Farrar characterized her as "a baffling ingenue [who] carried the inevitable parasol to shade her baby-like complexion, which she candidly confessed 'took hours to fix up.' " Besides a complicated makeup regimen, Ward also endured several face-lifts as did her husband, Jack Dean. DeMille's casting instincts led him to the young Japanese actor Sessue Hay-akawa, who responded with an astonishing portrayal keying on sexual malice. In outline, Hayakawa's character is the heavy, but the actor's sexual magnetism is so intense, his acting so contained, that the audience's sympathy invariably gravitates toward him rather than Ward's silly society bitch.

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Hopper asked about DeMille's closed office door. "Shhh", he was told, "Mr. DeMille is thinking!"
"Is that possible?" Hopper asked.


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She walked across the white bearskin rug to DeMille's desk. Behind him there were two stained glass windows. The precisely calibrated effect was of a lord in his Gothic castle. "He liked that idea of being, shall I say, remote from you," wrote Julia. "He told me later that he got his desire for such an office from David Belasco, for whom he had worked as a young man." He glanced at her story idea. Faye wondered if there was a part for her in his next picture. "Yes, I think so," he told her, "but you will never be a star in pictures. "Because you haven't the right kind of personality. You are the 'cute' type.
In the theater we call them soubrette. Also, your face is too round, your nose too long and I want you to write. He told her that he thought she might be able to alternate with Miss Macpherson as a scriptwriter.

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